#112: Facebook Page vs. Group: What’s the Difference?

Well, hey there Health coaches. How are you doing today? Thank you so much for joining me. It's a beautiful day here in New York and yes, I am wearing my bathing suit and I'm going to be running off to the beach as soon as I'm done recording this today, because that's what it means to be a mom working full time and health coaching business, and full time taking care of two kids who don't have camp. Just raise a hand if you know what I'm talking about. All right, so we're doing a little bit of business and then we're going to go do a little bit of play. That's how balancing her days in any case, whatever you're up to today. Thank you so much for being here. I'm doing a little follow-up today because two episodes ago, we were talking about using Facebook groups. And so today I feel like I needed to say a little bit more about that since so many of you are asking, well, what's the difference?

What's the difference between a Facebook group and a Facebook page? Yes, let's get into that. And I also want to remind you that I am offering a free masterclass on how to use Facebook groups to grow your health coaching business. If you want in, on this entirely free class, here's the scoop. I'm offering it as a celebration of sorts for our Facebook group, because we are coming up on 10,000 members. We are getting close. Can you help us out? If you're not already a member, I want you to join us at health coach power, community.com. And if you are already a member, that's amazing. Please share that URL with your health coach friends, and just tell them why you love being part of our community, why they should bother joining by them. Joining you're going to help us reach that 10,000 Mark, and they are going to get access to that free Facebook groups class as well.

So thank you for spreading the word. I can't wait to help celebrate. It's a big milestone for us and like let's face it. After five plus years of running Facebook groups and my health coaching business. Also for you guys, I have learned a ton about what makes them work. And I plan to share all the details with you. So again, the URL to share is healthcoachpowercommunity.com.

So today's topic came from, like I said, so many of the questions that you guys have been asking, but this one in particular, which came from Lori and Lori said, hi, everyone. I'm so happy to be here with like-minded colleagues. I am a nurse coach and I've started a group specifically for clients with thyroid disease. Should I also create a business page or a public figure page? Does anybody know the difference and the pros and cons I plan on using one of them to provide paid content.

Okay. There's a lot to unpack there. Lori, let's go through that again. You started a group specifically for clients with thyroid disease. So when you start a Facebook group, right, people are only in that group, probably if you have approved them to be there, you can also have a completely open group that any Joe Schmo could join. And I do not recommend that because when it's just an open group and anybody can just say, join and become a part of your group, you are inviting a world of pain upon yourself. For real, you're inviting all kinds of like spammers and marketers and bots and whatever into your group. I highly recommend that all your groups are set to the mode where somebody has to request to join, and then you will approve them. So in this case, it sounds like you have groups specifically for just your clients, for paying clients.

So that's less let's see, that's not marketing in that case, that's actually providing your service, right? So if I have calls that I do with my clients, if I provide support via text message, if I'm giving them meal plans, if I'm giving them a massage, whatever I'm giving them, or I'm giving them a Facebook group, right? That's just how I'm providing a service for my clients. So if you're finding that that's helpful and how you want to run your coaching, that's how you want to be of service to your paying clients. That's great. So keep that sort of under business operations, but when you ask, should I create a business page or a public figure page, a page on Facebook is more under the category of marketing and a Facebook group. That's not for paying clients, but that's for anybody who wants to join and you approve them, you know, new people, new people to your audience, people who are not yet paying you, that can also be marketing.

So I think you want to break your question up into a few different things. One is how do I want to run my coaching business? You know, do I want a Facebook group or a community aspect? Great, whatever. Okay. That's one thing. And then when it comes to marketing yourself, I think the real question becomes, do you want a Facebook group or do you want a, a fan page or business page as they're called? So if you're here with me live, by the way, tell me, do you have a business page and do you find it useful? Cause I'm going to tell you what my experience has been when I started my business many, many moons ago and I had a Facebook page, you know, I could post something to it and anybody who liked my page would see it. And so it was pretty great.

You know, it was like, this is cool. This is free advertising. And people would leave comments. And you know, it was a real interactive space that that's, that's a Facebook page I'm talking about. But over the years, things have really shifted. And what I've noticed is that now these pages get very little reach, right? The Facebook algorithm has changed because they want you to pay for advertising. They don't want to just give you free exposure. So now when you post something to your business page, it reaches very few people. You know, if somebody actually goes to your page, they'll see it. But if they're just scrolling in their feed, it barely makes a dent. So to me, it's become less and less worthwhile to use there's way, fewer comments, way fewer people engaging on that page. And to me, it feels like a page that I have, even though I have a lot, I don't even know how many thousands of followers, maybe eight or 9,000 followers on that page.

It doesn't do a whole lot for me. It kind of sits there. And what I notice I even do as a consumer is if I find a business or brand that I like, or a practitioner that I like, I might look for them on Facebook. So I imagine people are looking for me on Facebook. They will find my business page. So it's nice to have it there and for it to be updated, you know, maybe you've posted to it sometime in the past week. But other than that, two thumbs down for me, it doesn't do a whole lot for my business. And I don't think you need to spend an awful lot of time with it. So yes, start one. No, don't stress out about it too much. It's something to have. It's kind of like having business cards in your purse. You know, you have them there in case you need 'em, whatever it's not making or breaking your business, but it's just kind of a good thing to have.

So the other thing that you might want to consider Lori is then creating a Facebook group that is open to the public. Of course, they still need to request to join. So you don't get spammers. And if you have a Facebook group, that can be an excellent marketing tool, because if you have a group for, let's say women with thyroid disease, you know, then this would be the group for people to join, to get support and get help around thyroid disease, to connect with other women who are suffering with the same symptoms. And this is a place that you can really dig in and start marketing yourself and sell your services down the line. That is what we're going to be talking about inside the free master class that I mentioned earlier. So that is the sort of the big difference between the two, because a group, once someone joins your group is very likely they are going to see all the things that you post much more so than a page, right?

So it's all about showing up in somebody's feed groups tend to be a place also where people are a bit more active and engaged because it's not public, like only other members of your private group are going to be able to see what's being posted. So somebody might share a bit more about their health issues or what's going on in their life where they may not do that on like a totally public page. So groups tend to be cozier and more supportive and definitely where I put more of my effort and I recommend that you do as well. So that's sort of a, you know, the pros and the cons in terms of using any of these to provide paid content, I would only do that inside a Facebook group that is specifically for your paying clients, obviously. So then you were only going to approve people into that group who have paid to be part of that, right?

And then you can provide anything in that group that you want to your paying clients. So that's like a couple of balls in the air, but again, in your mind, try not to think of it in terms of the technology, Facebook, Facebook group, or a page, or should I do this or try to think of it in terms of like, is this a business operations thing? What then tool do I need to accomplish my goal? Or is this a marketing thing? And then what tools do I need in order to attract a new audience and attract new clients? Whoa, that was a lot. I hope that's helpful, Lori. I'm just going to pop over to the group and see if, I mean, I know I'm broadcasting, but I can't see myself for some reason on Facebook right now. And I can't see any of your comments or who's here.

So I need to just go over there and look okay, there we go. Yes, you guys have lots of questions over here. It is so strange when you go live on Facebook lately, it's just catch as catch can. Sometimes you get all the comments shown to you and sometimes you do not, and it's still been driving me crazy for months now. I wish they would get it together. But again, it's a free tool, right? How can I complain? How can any of us complain about this amazing free tool that we have been given? So let's see here, Mardella says she has a business page and lately does not find it very useful, low engagement and exposure. Bingo. That's exactly right. That's exactly my experience as well. Shelly says she has a group, but no page. I mean, it's not a big deal, Shelly.

One big reason to start a page. Okay. One. So if somebody searches for you, they can find you. And the other is if you ever intend to run Facebook ads, you would run that through your Facebook page, basically. So that's the other reason to have it, but not a huge deal if you're not planning to run ads. And Mardella says she also has a group, which is more engaged as I described. Good. Thank you for backing me up. You guys, I know this isn't just my experience.

Okay. So here's another question on this sort of topic of Facebook groups and such, and this comes from Jenna and Janice says, hi there, I'm looking to start a Facebook group. I'm marketing myself as a faith based Christian health coach just started seeing pain clients a couple of months ago. And I was wondering about these names. So she gave us some options.

So names for her, her faith-based group one would be a healthy lifestyle guided by faith. Another could be healthy body, healthy mind, healthy spirit, a lifestyle guided by faith that might be too long. One is find true health, mind, body and spirit through faith. Says my goal is to start a community that focuses on lessons from the Bible that will lead to a healthy lifestyle - sharing information on nutrition, community rests, et cetera, supported by scripture. I also want it to be a place people can encourage another and pray for one another. Jenna. What I love about what you're doing is you're very, very clear on the type of person that you want to attract to your group. Right? Some people are going to be like, Oh, this is amazing. And other people are going to be like, alright, this is not for me.

And that is exactly what you want. Like all of us, like we should not be creating groups or anything in our marketing. That's just like healthy living, feeling healthy, you know? So I love that you are working in that word, faith into the title of your group. And I would encourage you all to name your groups with some sort of key word in the group name itself. Because if somebody is searching, you want to think about what might they be searching for? Like they might search for weight loss, and then they're going to find 37 billion groups about that. But if you can be more specific if they might be searching thyroid and in this case, they might be searching. And this is a question for you, Jenna, do you think they might be searching like faith or do you think they might be searching Christianity, Christian, like that kind of thing.

So, you know, choose a word that is most likely to be searched. Like the name of our Facebook group is health coach power community Facebook group, because I know that you guys go in there and type in health coach to see what kind of support is out there for you. So, and same on iTunes, right? People actually search health coach and find this podcast. So using keywords can be super duper helpful for this sort of thing. Anyway, Jenna the other thing that you might consider a number. Okay. So number one is using keywords. Number two is keeping it a little bit on the shorter side, right? Cause I, there's got to be a limit to how long these things are. You don't want it to be like a name and a tagline. It's just the name of the group. Right.

And you might also want to be a little more specific about what problem you are helping them solve. So again, when you say like healthy, that can mean so many things to so many people. And you might just think a little bit more about who's going to be in this group. Are they women? What is, what's their biggest problem? What are they looking to actually fix by being more healthy, quote unquote, do you know what I mean? Cause that would then let me know. Like, let's say that I am a, you know, a faith driven person and I want to be healthier, but like, should I join your group or not like, is it going to help me lose weight? Is it going to help me gain weight? You know, like what's the problem I'm trying to solve. So you might want to say something about that as well. You might be able to say it in the title of your group.

Definitely want to say something about it in the description of your group. So I hope that is helpful. Melissa says that her group name is diabetes is delicious. Okay, good. Cause that's what somebody might be searching for. Right. Help with diabetes. Perfect. What else are you guys saying here? Rosalyn says I have a group and a page when I do challenges or programs. Should I do a new group for each other? Coaches do this, but it seems like a pain. Okay. So yeah. You know, there's different ways to do it. There's no one right answer here. It kind of depends where your audience is. Like if you have a big active group. When I run five day challenges, I do them right inside of our group because I want all of our thousands and thousands of members to get a taste of what's going on because then more people end up joining along the way.

So it was very helpful for me to actually run the challenge within the larger group. If your main group is not that big then I could see potentially starting another group, like a popup group, right? Just for your challenge. But honestly, if you're trying to expand your reach, if you're trying to get outside of your current group members, you could also consider running a challenge on your business page, which is public. So anybody can see it. And that will have even greater impact on how many people you're able to reach. You know, if a friend is like going to share your video or share something from the challenge, like great, that's awesome. They can do that cause it's a public page and that just helps get you in front of more people. Whereas if you broadcast something into a group, nobody can share it outside the group.

So all just different things to think about. It depends on what your goals are and where your audience already lives. Unless it says her group is growing, but there's very little engagement. I'm now going live weekly, announcing it to the group as a reminder, good. Also created my life as a group event. And that seems to be helping yes. The more content you can create, the more you can show up in your group and make it like a destination, make an actual useful place, give people a reason to show up. Definitely the better. So I love that you're doing those things and that re Oh actually, Melissa, I have a question from you. I was going to answer it today anyway. So thanks for showing up. So here's the question that you asked me earlier. You asked this in the group earlier. Melissa said I have a growing Facebook group, but I'm realizing, I've been told by many members that notifications aren't set to see the groups posts and my lives, any tips on how I can capture the group's attention and let them know to turn their notifications on this.

Like made me pause cause I'm like, huh. Well, are people getting notified like in my groups and like, am I getting notified on other people's groups? So I actually went into all the groups that I'm active in as a member and checked like, are my notifications turned on? Because I know which groups are always popping up in my feed sometimes. Like I see the same ones all the time, all the time. And it was really interesting what I found just that this is like my own little personal experiment, right? Because Facebook is always changing how they do stuff. But I looked in some groups that I don't see very much of in my feet. I actually had notifications turned on and other groups that I only had it turned on to highlights, like you can have a group turned on to like, just see the highlights.

I actually saw a ton of posts from that group in my feed, like every day. So what I think, and this was kind of my hunch from the beginning is that what I think is you get the most engagement in your Facebook groups when there's a lot of engagement in your Facebook groups, it's like a self fulfilling prophecy, you know? So the groups that have a lot of people commenting, asking questions and you're going live regularly and you know, it builds on itself like a snowball effect. So the more you can put out really valuable content, I think that is always like your number one way to get engagement. And that's true about Facebook groups. It's true about Instagram, you know, anything, anything that you're doing, like the better quality of the support and the information and the way you're showing up, like that's what drives engagement and that's what you can really build a business on.

So yes, you could probably say to your group members like, Hey, click here and turn on notifications. That feels very self serving. I don't know how well that's going to do for you. I think better to just make the group so vibrant and full of life that people are going to be drawn to it. The algorithm is going to favor it automatically. And that's certainly, what's been my experience inside of my groups. And you know, you can do that on purpose by the way. So one example would be, Oh, this is an easy example for me to share. Let's say, you're you want to, let's say you want to post like an article. It's something that you wrote or whatever, something from the New York times, let's say you post that into your group. You could just say like, Oh, here's a cool article. I thought you guys might be interested, great.

Whatever. Or you could say, here's a great article. I thought you guys might be interesting comment below with the part that surprised you the most or comment below. And tell me what you disagree about in this article or something like that. Because the more comments that something gets like that's how Facebook like wakes up and goes, Oh, this is an important post. We should propagate this out to more members of the group, et cetera. So try to like actively create engagement. That is my tip for you.
Okay. Moving on. This is a question from Erin. And she said, I have a question, but she couldn't make it live today. So that's okay. Erin, I got you. She said, how do you decide what content to share in your group versus what is in your group program? And I'm going to extend that question to, how do you decide what content to share on your Facebook page versus a group, a free group that is meant for marketing and then inside of a paid program.

That's tough, right? I mean, ultimately when you're marketing yourself, you want to give away your best content, give it away freely, do not hold back. So if you know the secret to reversing type two and you have a little formula for it that you can write down real easy, like share that, like that's, what's going to make you your millions. Not that that exactly exists, but if it did, maybe it does. Hey, what do I know? Whatever your very best content is, share it and share it freely because that's, what's going to make you stand out. That's what somebody is going to go. Whoa, this person knows their stuff. Like I'm going to pay attention to everything she says or everything he says. So it's not that you should hold back information per se or content. But I think the big difference comes in the interaction because if like someone in a, my Facebook group, and this is a group that like an open group that you have as a way of marketing yourself, or even on your Facebook page, if somebody says like, should I go gluten free?

It doesn't make sense to get into it with them in, in that space because a they're not a paying client, but that's not the real reason. The real reason is you don't know enough about them. You don't know their health history. You don't, you can't answer these types of questions for somebody. You'd be doing them a disservice. If you just gave them like a blanket, like yes or no, or, you know, recommendation or anything. Like we shouldn't be doing that anyway. So I like easy, like simple, very straightforward questions stuff that's not very personalized. I think you can freely give away on a page inside of a Facebook group. You know, like you can talk about topics, but what you can't do is like get into the weeds. Like for example, earlier we were talking about Jenna's Facebook group for her, for Christian people who want to be healthy.

So like, I can, I can give Jenna like some tips. I can talk about it in broad terms, but like Jenna and I are not going to sit here right now and go back and forth on a hundred different names and like actually help her arrive at a decision. So that's sort of the difference between when someone is part of your paid program or when someone is part of your, your, your, your audience, right? Like how deeply you're going to get into it with them. If someone is in a paid program, they're a client of mine and they want to talk about going gluten free. Like, yeah. Like we're going to talk about that. We are going to talk about it in depth. We are going to go through their whole health history. We're going to explore that topic because they're paying client. So I, one way to think about it is you can give away all the content that you want for free.

And that's the, what you can always give away the what, but people pay you for the how, and that's really how it applies to their individual situation, how they should go about it. Like all the personalized aspects of it. That's what goes into a paid program. Awesome. Boom. So many good questions today, you guys. And so glad I had a couple others here that kind of take us in a different direction and I'm happy to answer those. I'm just going to check and see if anyone else is asking about Facebook stuff. Oh, and by the way, I'm just realizing that I broadcast this whole thing. You can see the edge of my backdrop. Oh man. I got a new computer. I got a new laptop a couple weeks ago and the camera is so much better. It's like a very wide lens. So my old laptop, you could only see like from here to here and now with the wide lens you can see from like here to here.

And sometimes you end up seeing the edge of my backdrop. Well, there you go, guys. A little peek behind the scenes. All right. Let me answer a question from Christopher. He said, hello. I am new here. And a brand new health coach. I'm wondering how people focus on a niche first is that I'm wondering how people focus on with niche. Okay. Let's keep going. First. First off, I have a lot of topics I would like to focus on second. I'm not experienced enough to even test out any of them, but at the same time you need focus to get clients regularly. So what do people do when so early into it? Christopher, what I think you're saying is how can you choose a target market if you haven't actually worked with any clients yet? Am I right? Okay. You should work with clients. You should definitely take on anybody who is willing to work with you, particularly in the beginning, because that is the best way to know who do I actually do my best work with?

Who should I be targeting? Who should I be working with? Right. So I would say first and foremost, you don't need to worry about really strategic marketing efforts on day one of your business on day one, you're like, hi, next door neighbor, hi friend from high school, Hey roommate from college, you know, like you just trying to get anyone to work with you and you could even tell them that you're new. It's almost like an internship. And you are looking for, you could call them like your beta testers or, you know, something like that. You just need experience working with anyone in the beginning, even if you're still in school. Right. That's when I was in school, they encourage us to go out and get our first clients while we were still in the program. Because that's kind of how you start figuring this stuff out.

It's just by working with anyone who will work with you. So when you're very early on yes, it's good to start thinking about a target market. No, you do not have to put all your eggs in one basket. Quite yet. A target market is a tool. It's a marketing tool. So it is not necessary if like you're just talking to your friend about becoming a client or like your sister wants to be your client it's necessary when you start going out into the world and like actively marketing yourself. Because then you're saying these are the types of people I want to attract. And so if you have an opportunity to do a workshop, if you're going to be a guest on a podcast, if you're going to be like blowing it out the doors with social media, you do need to know who you're targeting or else your message is just going to be super, super wishy washy.

But when you're first starting out, definitely take any experience. You can get the other way to focus your, when you're trying to choose a target market is to think about who, who you are, what you know, best, what your life experience is. Because often as coaches, we end up working with people who are a lot like us, people who are like maybe a few steps behind where we are now, because that's probably the health issues and the type of person. And you're going to just know the most about someone who is like you. So that can also be a very good way to start anyway, wishing you all the best, but that as you get started, and I know it's scary, but for real, just start working with anybody and do it before you feel ready because nobody feels ready. Sometimes I get on a client call like now and I'm like, Oh gosh, can I even help this person?

Maybe I'm not ready. I've been doing this for 11 years. You guys, okay? It's always there. That level of self doubt. Just do it anyway. I mean, I'm going to answer one more question. And this one comes from Amanda. Oh yeah. I thought this was a, this was an important one for me to hit. She said, can anyone recommend a very cost effective digital advertising, strategist and implementer with experience in health and wellness. I'm looking for a freelancer who can maximize SEO, find lookalike audiences, Google ad words, et cetera, for a new start. I've had a look at Upwork and Fiver, and it's really difficult to know who to choose. And then she also said, my challenge is I do not have a big budget.

Amanda. I don't know anything about your business. I can only guess that you are similar to most of the health coaches in this group. So I'm going to answer this question from that perspective, hiring somebody to do all of your marketing the way you have described is expensive. Like expensive. Like I don't even do all of that in my business. I hire out for some of those things and we are talking several thousands of dollars on retainer for each person. That's not even just one person who does all this stuff. Usually at one person who does Facebook ads for you, you might have somebody else who's a strategist. You might have somebody else for SEO. And when you're talking thousands of dollars a month for each of them, it is not cheap. So if you do not have a big budget, you are in good company. None of us have a big budget. I don't think I've ever spoken to a health coach. That's like, oh yeah, I have all this start-up capital.

I mean, I started my business with, I had nothing. It's just, you're just bootstrapping it for awhile. So when you're like, can you recommend a very cost effective marketer? I'm like, it's you. Like Amanda, it's you, you want to learn the basics. You want to be doing things for yourself. There's so much that we can do on $0 million. And that's how you get a business off the ground. In fact, I think it wouldn't even make sense or an early stage in your business when you don't have that much client experience or that many, maybe test them. And I'm just making some assumptions about you, Amanda. I really don't know. But you know, if you don't have that many testimonials or case studies and you're really just starting out and you don't have a lot of money, it wouldn't even make sense to have this super big, fancy whizzbang website that, you know, Google's pull it up.

It's just, it doesn't make any sense. It's not going to work for you. You know? So you kind of always want to do the marketing that is appropriate for the budget that you have. And it's very easy to get sucked into these schemes where you're like, Oh yeah, I can do all this stuff for you. Somebody might be telling you, you know, I can offer you this and I can offer you that. And here just give me all your money and you do that. And then you might not even get any results. And now you just gave them like the thousands of dollars that you had in the bank. And now you're, you're flat out. It is so much smarter to just learn one little bit at a time, learn how to, you know, do social media a little bit better than you are doing it today.

Learn how to, you know, use keywords on your blog post. So they show up a little bit better in search engines. Like there's so much that you can do to optimize for yourself. I would exhaust that first for sure. Before you even think about hiring somebody because digital marketing and advertising is like mucho denero, all right, you guys, that is it for today. Remember that now is the time to join our health coach power community Facebook group. So we can get to 10,000 members by the end of the month. And then we were going to celebrate with a completely free, full with masterclass on how to use Facebook groups to grow your health coaching practice. And that is the kind of marketing that costs $0 million. It just requires your presence and your passion. This is what makes a lot of sense for those of us who were kind of like bootstrapping to get a business going so you and all of your health coach friends can join us at healthcoachpowercommunity.com in order to make that class happen. Thank you for being here and I'll see you next week, everybody.